WP#03 Galaxie by Olivier Cablat

The book Galaxie reunites two series, two strata belonging to two different ways of producing images with technology, one analog and the other digital.

The photographs of the nightclubs are the result of an inventory of the outskirts of urban zones, where the photographer seeks out the clubs registered in the telephone book. The territory is recoded thanks to a specific glossary. As for Proust’ Names of places, these commercial and industrial zones are reorganised, driven by fantasy: « The Star », « The Cruise » or by a TV series’ geography : Dallas, Miami, Malibu…

The principles that construct the second series in the book « Galaxie » are visually opaque, but inflexible: Each image comes from an internet search with the names of the nightclubs used to bring whatever image comes up. The book opposes the artificial typology of nightclubs that is only randomly encyclopedic to the variable index systems of search engines. By this double inventory Olivier Cablat reminds us that what we consider to be real is first of all the result of an organization imposed onto this world. The book plays with this constant reorganization, which is less an historical evolution than a never-ending play with the same materials.

The ensemble of images – deriving from one to another – designs a map of the unconscious of nightclubs. This ensemble stands as a psychoanalytical speech of the neutral buildings, in which one enters only through words. We will never see what happens inside, only the projected images.

From one stratum to the other, we are reminded that the empire of the image is built upon the empire of language, but on a secret language that does not easily disclose it’s low def fantasies. The book « Galaxie » is not only the presentation of two series of work by this artist, it is a visual machine, constantly refreshing commercial fantasies, where images are worn-out by dint of representing names of long-forgotten things.